Agile Development Races Ahead of Traditional Testing

Agile practices are breaking apart traditional testing organizations. Agile developers invariably perform more testing so QA professionals need to involve in the daily operations of the development team mentioned by Diego Lo Giudice, principal analyst at Forrester Research, in his recent blog on Why agile development races ahead of traditional testing.

As per Deigo in this recent trend, QA professionals should focus more on advance testing practices.

They need to adapt to changing circumstances by getting deeply involved in the Advanced practices such as test-driven development, increased testing automation and continuous build and integration make a significant impact on the day-to-day activities of developers and testers.

Separate testing and developers team doesn’t fit into agile work environment, stated by Deigo.

When testing teams are separated from development, it is typical for testers to try to find as many bugs as possible – but only after the developers have written the code……

Segregating testers from developers makes it hard to integrate their work into a continuous delivery pipeline.

Instead of…We are here to find bugs or ensure requirements are met or break the software

Think how do we “bake quality in”?

Deigo mentioned why traditional testing lags behind agile.

Large volumes of manual test activities slow down delivery.

Teams only start testing once they have developed and integrated the system. Unfortunately, projects often fall behind schedule, so teams compress and sacrifice the activities left at the end.

Teams build up too much technical debt. One sure-fire killer of on-time delivery is finding out late in the development cycle that your application has major quality problems. Late discovery of defects lead to high rates of rework and waste.

Because of these reasons a shift is important in testing to comply it with agile development. These shifts in testing practices also change how development teams select testing tools. Deigo shared his views on testing tools

Developers want tools that easily plug into their integrated development environments (IDEs), while QA and other software professionals prefer tools that offer a higher level of abstraction and are easy to use.